ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605210005
SECTION: DISCOVER PAGE: 52 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
WE'RE NOT SAYING the New River Valley is a breeding ground for successful writers. Not at all. It has to be a coincidence ... doesn't it?
Ask Printers Ink bookstore manager Emily Stanton how many authors who live in or write about the New River Valley line her shelves, and you're in for a long answer.
"I mean, there are gazillions of them," Stanton says. And every time she thinks she's about completed the list, she will think of another one.
Sharyn McCrumb of Shawsville has her characters solve murder mysteries at places that include the New River Valley.
Rebecca Ore of Critz has space aliens landing in Floyd County. Katherine Neville of Radford not only takes her readers through international high-finance circles but through time to the French Revolution and other historic points of interest.
Blacksburg's Ann Goethe has published short stories, plays, and a novel that became a Literary Guild selection.
Virginia Tech is well-represented. Nikki Giovanni, English professor and best-selling poet, author and essayist, not only writes but recruits others such as the residents of the Warm Hearth Village retirement community, who published a book of their own work.
Ed Falco, another Tech English professor, has several critically acclaimed short-story collections out.
Professor James I. Robertson is known for his writings on the Civil War, and Marshall Fishwick for his books on popular culture.
Donald Secreast, who teaches at Radford University, has published two collections of stories, many focusing on life in the 1950s.
Another Radford faculty member, John Rutherford, has carved out a reputation as a genre movie expert in books and articles on film history.
Carl Bean, a Virginia Tech English instructor, is a mystery writer whose latest book, "A Soul To Take," introduces a new female homicide detective.
More off-the-wall work by area writers includes "Wisdom From the Walls," a collection of graffiti from across the nation by Blacksburg's Kristen Kammerer; Don Bloss' "Sammy Seahorse Teaches Chess"; and Suzi Gablik's art-oriented "Conversations Before the End of Time."
And that doesn't even touch the books for young people by Blacksburg neighbors Lou Kassem, with a dozen or more published, and newcomer Erin Flanagan, who recently published the "Angel By My Side" trilogy.
William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk (a sub-genre of science fiction from which he has moved on and a term for which he doesn't much care), spent most of his teen-age years in Wytheville. Poet and writer David Huddle is an Ivanhoe native, and many current Wythe County residents recognized people and situations in his short-story collection, "Only the Little Bone," drawn from his growing-up years.
Stanton is right. There do seem to be gazillions.
McCrumb's latest novel featuring amateur sleuth Elizabeth MacPherson, "If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him...," involves a preacher with two wives, a prosperous Roanoke lawyer whose ex-wife resorts to gunplay, a murder case dating back to the Civil War, and one other love affair gone wrong which can only be read, not described.
"My editors in New York and London ask me 'Where do you get this stuff?''' McCrumb has said. "I tell them that a subscription to the Roanoke Times can be very useful."
Her short stories have appeared in many anthologies, including the "Sisters in Crime" and "Cat Crimes" series. In "Royal Crimes: New Tales of Blue Bloody Murder," she has a story ostensibly narrated by Princess Diana. She even wrote the text for the first story in "The Book of Ballads and Sagas," a six-issue series of comic books illustrated by Charles Vess of Bristol.
Her Elizabeth series, which now numbers eight novels, started with "Sick of Shadows" in which one of Elizabeth's friends ends an engagement by pushing her fiance into a pond at Virginia Tech when he makes a joking comment about her weight. Elizabeth has never looked back.
McCrumb learned that she and Buchanan County native Lee Smith based their novels, "Sick of Shadows" and "Family Linen," on the same actual event, but each put her own spin on it.
McCrumb attended Virginia Tech's annual science fiction convention, Technicon, several times researching "Bimbos of the Death Sun," her Edgar Award-winner set at such a Tech convention. Its central characters reappeared in "Zombies of the Gene Pool."
McCrumb is unlikely to be sympathetic to people whining that they don't have time to write. She wrote "Bimbos" in 1987 in less than two months to meet her publisher's deadline while working full time five days a week in Tech's Appalachian Studies Department, teaching two night classes, and being pregnant with the first of her three children.
But her most ambitious work is what she calls her "ballad" series, all set in Appalachia. The first two were New York Times Notable Books.
"If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O'' was followed by "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter,'' a Pulitzer nominee, and "She Walks These Hills," which won the mystery field's McCavity, Agatha and Anthony awards and features a fictional Virginia Tech professor among its characters. Her latest, "The Rosewood Casket," has just been published.
Rebecca Ore's first novel, "Becoming Alien," starts with a spaceship landing in Floyd County and continues through two other books - "Being Alien" and "Human to Human" - in which her Floyd protagonist interacts with people in a galactic culture.
In her short story "Alien Bootlegger," the title character settles in Franklin County to do research on moonshining. That story was reprinted in "The Year's Best Science Fiction" for 1993.
"The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid" dealt with the problems of cloning. For "Slow Funeral," Ore returned to her Virginia setting but makes it a secret home for modern-day witches, with the magic of its residents being as real to them as high school football. Even her latest, "Gaia's Toys," with near-future eco-terrorists trying to stop the development of a genetic government weapon, starts in Southwest Virginia.
Radford's Katherine Neville sold her first book, "The Eight," to publishers in 12 countries. A kind of historical mystery, it has parallel stories set 200 years ago and today connected by a sought-after chess set with mystical powers.
In her more recent "A Calculated Risk," Neville drew on her own experience as a former Bank of America vice president for a thriller about big-stakes wheeling and dealing in the world of high finance. Her heroine agrees to prove that world banking security is not as secure as its officials believe.
When some of her West Coast friends asked Neville several years ago what she would do with her time after settling in Radford, she replied, "Write, write, write." And she has been doing it quite successfully.
Erin Flanagan has flashed onto the youth readership scene with three books at once: "Lily's Story," "Amelia's Story" and "Grace's Story," making up a trilogy. Flanagan credits writer and neighbor Lou Kassem for helping her get started. "She felt that I had what it took to write and introduced me to her agent," Flanagan said.
Kassem, who has been a lab technician at Virginia Tech and a librarian for the Montgomery Floyd Regional Library, and a Blacksburg Town Council member, credits the inadvertent research she did raising four daughters for the success of "Middle School Blues," which sold 250,000 copies in the past decade and is still going strong.
"Our house was always the gathering place for all the different ages,'' she said. "And they talked. And I listened. So I didn't have any problems.''
A dozen books later, she has been included in International Authors and Writers Who's Who (14th Edition) and been named in the Contemporary Authors-U.S.A. Where she once told her stories at slumber parties or wrote them as scripts for church or civic group performances, she now tells them in books.
Her third, "Listen for Rachel,'' may be her favorite so far. It draws on a legend she heard growing up in the mountains of East Tennessee, of a Civil War-era mountain woman who was a natural healer and, some said, was still heard today galloping her horse to where someone was ill or in trouble.
Many of her stories are set in Virginia, such as "A Haunting in Williamsburg,'' which gained the official approval of the Williamsburg Historical Association and "The Treasure of Witch Hat Mountain," placed in Abingdon.
Even authors who have passed away still have books in print. Radford's Jess Carr wrote both fiction (``Murder in the Wind'') and nonfiction (``The Second-Oldest Profession'') when he was active. The late Dave Pedneau of Princeton, W.Va., whose "letter perfect" mystery series included "APB," "DOA," "BOLO," "AKA" and "B&E," had his hard-boiled investigator and beautiful newspaper reporter passing through the New River Valley in their quests to solve murders.
And the stories continue to pour out. Radford's Charles Saplak, who won the 1993 Writers of the Future Award for a short story, has kept publishing in a variety of magazines such as "Tomorrow" and "Science Fiction Age." A number of valley residents are featured in "Stories from Sherwood Anderson Country," culled from a decade of annual writing-contest winners in Marion where Anderson, himself a well-known author, lived and wrote. A second volume is being considered.
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essayist. 4. Ed Falco\Short-story master. 5. Anne Goethe\Literary
Guild choice.